What’s ahead for Washington
this week: Gone hunting (for votes)

Washington, May 30 – This week’s focus turns to the countryside and
the waterside, to political battles back at home and the BP oil disaster in the
Gulf.

Following Memorial Day to honor veterans Monday, Agriculture
Sec. Vilsack begins his week hearing Western views out in Montana, accompanied by White House Council
of Environmental Quality Chair Nancy Sutley, Sens. Max Baucus and Jon Tester,
and Gov. Brian Schweitzer. Then he heads to Missouri for USDA’s National Rural Summit on
Thursday. In both Montana and Missouri, he’s likely to
hear plenty of strong views about the way the U.S. EPA seems to be zeroing in
on CAFOs with a wave of Clean Water Act enforcement actions.

With Congress in recess, Senate Agriculture Committee Chair
Blanche Lincoln (D-AR) will be especially busy. She’ll be back home in Arkansas this week fighting
for her third Senate term against a tough primary challenge from Arkansas Lt.
Gov. Bill Halter. A clear measure of the threat is that Lincoln has brought in former President Bill
Clinton to rally support with the June 8 run-off vote just a week away. With
Halter ahead in some polls, national labor unions are spending heavily, with
lots of out-of-state support, to oust Lincoln
for being too conservative.

Other members of Congress and particularly Sen. Lisa
Murkowski (R-AK), along with top administration officials, will be focusing
instead on the BP disaster. Murkowski maintains that the Gulf “accident”
shouldn’t be allowed to slow the pace of oil drilling. Others like Sen. Bernie
Sanders (I-VT) point instead to details emerging which appear to indicate that
BP ignored safety rules and deliberately ignored specific wellhead pressure
warnings – making the blowout an avoidable, man-made disaster, not an accident.

Critics see the BP blowout – and last fall’s similar
blowout off Australia’s
coast which took 10 weeks and five relief wells to cap – as clear evidence that
all offshore drilling should be banned until new rules and truly fail-safe
technology can be developed. In this view, the Gulf’s devastated fishing areas
and breeding grounds should signal an urgent need to accelerate the development
of ethanol and other forms of renewable energy.

The
BP spill very likely will be on the agenda when international climate experts meet
in Bonn for a two-week summit starting Monday to
prepare for the next climate meeting in Cancun in November which will work on a
new international climate treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol in 2012. Meanwhile, congressional
staffers will work away in the hope that the Senate will be able to make
progress on key legislative efforts when it resumes business June 7 on
extending biofuels tax breaks and taking up bills on climate change and
immigration reform.

This week’s guest on Open Mic is Rod Hebrink, President and CEO of Compeer Financial. The lack of certainty from a new farm bill and weak commodity prices due to lost export markets and robust supplies have left farmers and lenders with a grim outlook for 2019. In this interview, Hebrink discusses the challenge of the unknown and the need for legislators and the White House to take action on farm policy, trade and regulations to help rural America prepare for the year ahead.

The world of agriculture extends beyond what’s growing in your field or living in your barn, and here at Agri-Pulse, we understand that. We make it our duty to inform you of the most up-to-date agricultural and rural policy decisions being made in Washington D.C. and examine how they will affect you – the farmer, the lobbyist, the government employee, the educator, the consultant and the concerned citizen.